Life Aquatic | Racing Hydrogen | Marie Curie - The Convo Kit #24

Bonjour, hola! I’ve spent the past week on vacation in France and Spain. Here are some cool TCK stories from each country.

p.s. Cyber Week gift idea: They’ll love a Convo Kit in their inbox!

-Steve

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The Life Aquatic

Spain’s Triton Submarines completed 13 world first dives along their way to become the global leader in deep-sea exploration. Their submarines are not only for record-breaking daredevils, a full line of customizable subs is available for average billionaires, too.

• Triton 36,000/2 can reach the deepest ocean floor in ~3 hours

• $4 million buys you a sub for 3,280 ft below sea-level

• 17 deepest dive records

Triton first came to my attention through a story of Victor Vescovo’s mission to reach the lowest depth of any human. His highly specialized team took a Triton sub down nearly 11,000 feet in the Mariana Trench back in 2019.

Check out Triton’s site for submarine window-shopping. Deep dive into Victor’s story here.

Hydrogen Race Truck

French tech company, Gaussin, will test their hydrogen-based race truck in the brutal Dakar rally of 2022. Other renewable-energy powered vehicles will compete, but this will be the first to use hydrogen.

• Power: 600 kw (804 hp)

• Range: 155 miles

• Refuel time: 20 minutes

Despite looking like a souped-up zamboni, the H2 has a real chance to win the renewable power category of the race. A Dakar finish would go a long way in proving the viability of Guassin’s skateboard chassis platform.

Check out the sleek truck here. Or watch soccer players check it out here.

Marie Curie

Blast from the past: If you’ve ever received an x-ray, you can thank French physicist Marie Curie. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and only woman to win it in two different fields. She is responsible for the discovery of polonium and radium.

• Nobel Prizes: Physics (1903) + Chemistry (1911)

• Coined the term “radioactivity”

• Born in Warsaw, Poland

Marie’s work with radium compounds became the source for how we use radiation today. She died of leukemia caused by radiation in 1934 and her ashes are now enshrined in Paris’ Pantheon.

More information about Marie here.

Blind Vision

Spanish and American researchers enabled a blind woman to see. A video camera sent image data to a microelectrode array implanted in her brain.

• Tested for 6 months with no complications

• Implant: 4mm² and holds 96 electrodes

• Camera was mounted to a pair of glasses

The test subject, a former teacher, has been blind for 16 years and could identify some letters and objects with the implant. A clinical trial will begin in May 2024 and could lead to restoring vision for millions of people.

Check out more info and a look at the glasses.

Alien Blob

Originally featured in TCK #10, Physarum polycephalum is a single-cell slime that defies earthly classification. So we sent it to the International Space Station. The blob is not an animal, plant, or fungus, yet it can grow, move, and learn on its own.

• 720 sexes

• Solves mazes

• Simultaneously studied on the ISS and in ~4,500 French schools

The blob is shipped in a dehydrated state called “sclerotia”. Four sclerotia were activated on the ISS to observe how this flubber-wannabe reacts to zero-gravity. 350,000 students across France participated in a similar study while the rest of us wait for the results.

More info about le blob here.

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